Land cover information is a key environmental information for many scientific, resource management and
policy purposes as well as for a range of human activities. Land cover information is currently scarce for Ghana, which
is undergoing rapid and wide-range changes in vegetation due to climate change, the practice of slash-and-burn or
shifting cultivation. Although remote sensing technology has been used for mapping in Ghana for some time now, there
have been little attempts to use either unsupervised or supervised classification methods for NOAA/AVHRR images for
the whole of Ghana. Therefore a qualitative approach to the use of low resolution NDVI data to produce land cover
maps of Ghana and also to evaluate the relative change in land cover from 1982 to 2002 is of essence. The study was
carried out by applying principal component analysis and classification of average NDVI values. It showed that the
dominant land cover change process was conversion of natural vegetation to savannah and shrub thicket, which
occurred at an annual rate of 4% and 6.5% respectively. Most of the land cover change process occurred in the first
period (1982-1992).The overall annual rate of change in land cover (1982-1992) was highest for agriculture (3.5%) and
lowest for water (1.03%). The results suggest that, yearly phonological behavior as revealed by NDVI data can be used
to map general patterns in the spatial distribution of Ghana’s main vegetation formation.